Many companies in the adult industry are prepared to work with us. Playboy, for instance, works with us on a purely voluntary basis online. There is no law obliging it to work with us, but it wants to ensure that all the pornography it provides is fully legally and compliant with British Board of Film Classification standards, and is provided to adults only. We are already working in this space with a number of players.

Alan Wardle: Yes. In terms of online safety, a whole range of things are needed and a whole lot of players. This will help the problem. We would agree and want to work with BBFC about a proportionality test and identifying where the biggest risks are to children, and for that to be developing. That is not the only solution.
Yes, we believe that statutory personal, social and health education and sexual relationships education is an important part of that. Giving parents the skills and understanding of how to keep their children safe is also really important. But there is a role for industry. Any time I have a conversation with an MP or parliamentarian about this and they have a child in their lives—whether  their own, or nieces or nephews—we quickly come to the point that it is a bit of a nightmare. They say, “We try our best to keep our children safe but there is so much, we don’t know who they are speaking to” and all the rest of it.
How do we ensure that when children are online they are as safe as they are when offline? Of course, things happen in the real world as well and no solution is going to be perfect. Just as, in terms of content, we would not let a seven-year-old walk into the multiplex and say, “Here is ‘Finding Nemo’ over here and here is hard core porn—off you go.”
We need to build those protections in online so we know what children are seeing and whom they speaking to, and also skilling up children themselves through school and helping parents. But we believe the industry has an important part to play in Government, in terms of regulating and ensuring that spaces where children are online are as safe as they can be.

David Austin: That is my understanding as well. We work very closely with Ofcom. Ofcom regulates this UK on demand programme services as the Authority for Television On Demand, but it applies our standards in doing so. That is a partnership that works pretty effectively and Ofcom has done an effective job in dealing with that type of content. That is one bit that is carved out from the Bill and already dealt with by Ofcom.

Dr Whitley: It depends. There has been talk along the lines of there being codes of practice and liaison with the Information Commissioner’s Office, so at a very high level there has obviously been some discussion. But at the very specific level—for example, the civil registration clauses talk both about allowing a yes/no check around whether there is a birth certificate associated with a family, while on the other hand there will be bulk data sharing within Government so that different Departments can know stuff and possibly make things better for society.
One half of that seems to be quite specific, and you can see how it could well be designed as a simple “Does a birth certificate exist for this person?” and the answer is yes or no. The privacy protections around that are reasonably well known and not very much data is being shared. Then the other illustration just says, “we will share this data with other bits of Government” and there is nothing there about what kind of privacy protections might be put in place. There are many different ways in which that can be done, but until we have some specific details, we cannot give you sensible reviews as to whether that is a good or not so good way of doing it.

Calum Kerr: Q  He will again.
I would like to ask you about the USO, and then  I would like to come on to the mobile environment. I have a problem with the USO not just because of the lack of ambition and what 10 megabits for people living in those areas, but because the tactical low-speed USO will not push fibre a lot further. The lines between wired and wireless are blurring all the time, so would a more ambitious USO with faster speeds help you, in terms of pushing fibre further and putting other infrastructure out there?

Renate Samson: I am Renate Samson, chief executive of Big Brother Watch. We were also a member of the open policy making group and the Privacy and Consumer Advisory Group, to which Dr Whitley referred to earlier.

Renate Samson: I do not even know what my blood type is. To answer your question, I don’t know. I would have to give it serious consideration, just as I would whether I would be prepared to donate organs after I die. It is not something to which I can give you a snap answer.

Renate Samson: Forgive me, I do not recall being quite as you have said; I know that Dr Whitley said something very similar to what you just said. Our concern is that I cannot give an answer, because I do not feel as though the Bill has defined clearly what data sharing is or what are personal data. I cannot give an answer without being able to understand what the Government intend to do with regards to data sharing. Troubled families and the retuning of televisions are not included in the Bill, they are referred to in the factsheet accompanying the Bill.

Paul Nowak: There are a number of points in the Bill where we think there are positive steps forward: things like universal service obligation. I am happy to talk about some of those points. The missed opportunity for  us is really getting a handle on what the emerging digital economy means for working people. Tomorrow, we will have the outcome of the court decision on Uber. That is just one example of where changing technology potentially affects working people’s lives. We believe there should be a proper framework and employment law should properly reflect the change in the world of work. The point was made by a number of MPs on Second Reading that the Bill missed a trick in terms of that new framework of rights and responsibilities for people who work.

Chris Taggart: Yes. First of all, I agree that what I would like to see is that the Government—
I do not think that was the question. I asked what you like about the Bill that would be of benefit to your clients or customers. It is quite long.

Nigel Adams: Q  Mr Nowak, you alluded earlier to the element of the Bill that you support and referred to musicians. The Bill is trying to bring in measures that would equalise the measures for copyright theft. That is really good thing to try, and the Musicians Union is very supportive of that measure. Is there anything else that you think would strengthen the Bill in terms of protecting rights holders? We have a huge problem in this country of content creators—rights holders—not getting rewarded because their work is put online illegally. There is quite a bit of work that the tech companies could be doing, but how do you think we could strengthen this area to protect many of your members?

Sarah Gold: I am very well versed in this area but I have very little time to talk about it, which is very frustrating. However, I think that looking at how individuals can question algorithms is very important; I agree with both of your comments. Particularly in GDPR, there is a clear piece that is about people being able to question automated decisions that are made about them.
As a design problem, that is really fascinating. For instance, if you think about when you buy flights on browsers, I think that everyone has probably seen that when you go back to book the flight again, your IP address   has been tracked, you are a cookie, and so you see the same flight booked for—it costs you more. So you go into kind of incognito mode to check that.
What I am quite interested in at the moment is that sort of incognito testing of algorithms, so that you can see how your inputs might change an output. In the context of Uber and insurance, I am very interested in this emergence of insurance for, say, a single day of driving or for a particular route, and being insured—say, it costs you far more to go down the M1 than just the A1. And you should be able to understand why that decision has been made about you, because it has a significant consequence on your life.
However, that also comes down to the quality of the training data, too, and that comes back to some of the terms of the Bill—we should be working towards greater data minimisation, I think, and also the ability for people to be able to audit not only those data, to correct those when they go wrong, but to provide an audit of data access. While it may not mean everything to all of us, because not all of us are developers, I think that for those individuals who are able to scrutinise the code and check for digital rights management or security vulnerabilities, or biases in data sets, that information is really crucial, because it is those individuals who are our greatest defence against data misuse or fraud.

Hetan Shah: May I come in and build on this? Privacy is absolutely critical to maintaining public trust, and in a sense we think the Bill has missed a trick here. On the research side, the framework is embedded on the face of the Bill. In our view, the ONS has a very good track record—it has maintained 200 years of census data, it has the best transparency, it publishes all the usage of the data and it has already criminalised the proceedings of misuse of data—but that has not been put on the face of the Bill. A tremendous amount could be done to reassure by taking what is already good practice and putting it on the face of the Bill, and I think that will answer the issue for the statistics and research purpose.

Hetan Shah: The Bill creates a permissive power and it really streamlines what at the moment is quite a complex legal environment for researchers accessing  Government data. This makes it much clearer that if a researcher meets a set of conditions—the research is in the public interest, the researcher is accredited and it will use the research in a safe haven, as it were, and so on—they are able to access that Government data.
We gave some case studies in our evidence of research that is obvious, such as what affects winter mortality and understanding the productivity gap. Those are questions that researchers want to investigate, but they cannot get hold of the data from Government Departments. To be fair to the Government, there is concern from their side about handing over data when the legal framework is not clear enough. I think this process will really streamline that.
One caveat is that it is slightly odd that health data are out of scope. Most of the biggest concerns that researchers have are in trying to build the relationship between survey data and, often, the health outcomes in certain areas. I understand the reasoning behind this: because of care.data there were some concerns. Health is very important. Our view is that the Bill should build in the scope of health data and then allow for future legislation to say how that will be dealt with, in particular once Fiona Caldicott, the national data guardian, has consulted on her framework, which is happening right now.

Hetan Shah: I think I said this earlier, but in case I was not clear I shall repeat it. For statistical and research purposes, statisticians and researchers are interested only in aggregates; they are not interested in us as individuals. It is an key point that the relevant clauses are quite different from some of the other parts of the Bill. Others have indicated in their evidence that this area should be seen as slightly different.
It is also worth noting that there are safeguards that have been tried and tested over many years. There is the security surrounding the data—the ONS will not even let me into the vault where they hold the data. You need to be accredited and to sign something saying that you will not misuse the data. If you do, you will go to jail. The trick that has been missed has been not saying all that, because it is almost assumed that that is how the ONS works. My suggestion is that if you want to strengthen that part of the Bill, you should just lay out the safeguards that are already common practice in the ONS.